


Please Accept This Modest Token

by M_Leigh



Series: SHIELD Founders Fandom Tumblr Fics [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Hydra (Marvel), not really canon compliant because i do what i want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:38:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2264805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It all happened because of Tony, or perhaps despite him. Or maybe it would have happened regardless of his interference. Ultimately, it was impossible to say, but looking back both Peggy and Howard would remember the moment that he, around one year of age, suddenly disappeared from the backyard.</i>
</p><p>Tony finds something in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Please Accept This Modest Token

**Author's Note:**

> Originally on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/96764157515/it-all-happened-because-of-tony-or-perhaps-despite). The first two sentences were the prompt; I took it from there.
> 
> I have not watched the Peggy short yet -- I am planning on writing a long (unrelated) Peggy & Howard fic and have some specific ideas of what I want to do with it, sort of independent of canon. (I will be writing this before Agent Carter airs for the same reason.) So anyway, this takes place in Westchester, not in California. Whaaaatever.
> 
> Also even though they are middle-aged, this is obviously Dominic Cooper, not John Slattery.
> 
> Finally, I stole pretty much everything about this from [nimmieamee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee), whose stuff you should all go read immediately, as it is superlative in every way.

It all happened because of Tony, or perhaps despite him. Or maybe it would have happened regardless of his interference. Ultimately, it was impossible to say, but looking back both Peggy and Howard would remember the moment that he, around one year of age, suddenly disappeared from the backyard (or, more accurately, the area of the backyard under the maples where the household staff had set up what Howard described as a picnic but was in fact a full-service lunch complete with antique table, chairs, sterling flatware, and homemade lemonade—the backyard of the Stark estate was, after all, vast).

“Where’s the squirt gone off to?” Howard said, peering around. He was not, naturally, drinking lemonade, although he had gamely tried some spiked at Peggy’s suggestion. It had not been appetizing. This had been her intention.

“I thought you had left him under the table with a toy ‘more amusing than ninety-nine percent of people,’” Peggy said, peering under the lace tablecloth, where indeed, no Anthony Stark remained.

“Crap,” Howard muttered, and knocked back the rest of his whisky before pouring himself another generous helping and getting to his feet. “Well, come on, then, let’s hunt him down.

“I’m blaming this on you, you know,” he said. “Your scintillating conversation. Your—very distracting company.”

“I’ve never felt more valued,” she said. “When I was a small child, growing up in a hovel with no running water and only a straw pallet for a bed, I used to think to myself, ‘If only one day a very rich alcoholic will use me as an excuse for his poor parenting—’”

“You lived in a perfectly nice house in—somewhere,” Howard said, peering into the bushes. “I’ve forgotten. I’m sure it was very charmingly middle class.”

“Sometimes I think I should turn you over to the government for all your illegal activity,” she said. Tony did not appear to be anywhere. It was remarkable, she thought, how far a very small and not particularly coordinated child could go in such a short period of time. “You could use a couple years in prison.”

“I have too much money to go to prison,” Howard said, taking a sip of his drink. “That’s how it works. Ah— _hah_.”

He poked his foot into the bushes, which Peggy could now see were bent substantially out of shape.

“You should have gone on safari,” she said.

“Really a pity,” he said with a sigh, and then proceeded to stomp through his landscaping into the untrammeled woods without a backwards glance. Peggy sighed, and hitched up her skirt. They were coming on fifty now, she and Howard. But although she suspected at some point his liver was going to quit in spectacular fashion, for the time being he remained a rather unstoppable force.

“Tony?” he called out. It was September in New York and the leaves had not begun to change yet, the cold not yet come, but in spite of the aggressively pleasant weather the summer was decidedly over. He took another sip of his whisky. He was tired, he thought, of New York winters. Of course, he did not, himself, spend a great deal of time at the estate in Westchester, and when he did it was usually cooped up in the basement, thinking about how best to explode things. He was in Washington, and in all the other cities in the country where people wanted to buy death, as often as he was home. He did like the house—the beautiful old house, which had been built to look even older than it was, which was very a American thing, one which had always amused him, considering how much effort Americans put into making _themselves_ seem younger than they were—and he liked the grounds, which were expansive and carefully groomed to look naturally messy. But he did not like the cold.

Maybe, he thought, they would move soon. But he would not tell Peggy about that thought, not while she was visiting, not until it was already just about done—maybe not until it was done entirely. Because if he moved he would move very far away, and that would be different than being just a few hours away by train, even if he did still go to Washington often enough to sell them his weapons, and to consult for SHIELD: to help her. He would go less, he knew, if he moved. In spite of the way he acted (and, indeed, thought, most of the time) he was not unaware of his age. He was not getting younger. Neither of them was.

He took another sip of his drink.

 _Where_ was Tony?

“I think that’s a sock,” Peggy said from behind him. He turned to look.

“So it is,” he said, and walked in the direction of the sock, which had caught on a bush.

“It’s like we’re back in Europe all over again,” he said, not un-cheerfully, kicking at some wet leaves.

She sent him a look. “It’s nothing like that at all,” she said. Howard, she thought, would be very happy to go back to that time, when he had been twenty-five and a prodigy and surrounded by people who were all working toward something together, not a middle-aged eccentric who shut himself up in his basement most of the time, when he wasn’t out sleeping around with god knew who in cities across the country.

She would not go back. She knew that there were things you just could not do. And that was one of them. (She could not admit it to herself, but if a ghost had appeared in front of her—a ghost of Steve, perhaps, or of Erskine, or of Colonel Phillips… or perhaps most dangerously, a ghost of Howard as he had been then, young and gleaming and brilliant and stupid, grinning his dazzling foolish smile at her, excited about everything and of course also secretly terrified—she might have gone. She might have done it, in spite of everything she had done since. But of course this would never occur. So it really did not matter whether she would have said yes or not.)

“You were never out trudging in the forest anyway,” she pointed out to Howard as they kept walking. He scoffed.

“I was _in the forest_ ,” he said vaguely. “And it’s not like _you_ were out marching with the infantry, Miss Carter.”

“ _Miss_ ,” she muttered under her breath.

“I don’t like to stand on—” he was saying as they broke into what could barely be described as a clearing, and saw the very small being that was Tony Stark standing wobblingly under a tree, clutching at the trunk and waving one of his pudgy little hands up at a very large weapon which both Peggy and Howard recognized which was swinging lazily from a branch above him.

Howard went very pale. The lines in his face became suddenly much more visible, his skin more papery—older. Peggy took a few purposeful steps forward and scooped Tony up into her arms. He made an aggravated sound and kept leaning around toward the gun, even as she turned around and started walking away.

“Come on now, Tony,” she said. “You don’t want that.”

His little face scrunched up in what promised to be screaming outrage before he looked up at her and blinked, thrown. “Hello,” she said somberly, settling him on her waist.

Torn between his anguish at being torn away from a promising toy and his natural delight at finding himself in the arms of his favorite person (except, of course, Jarvis, to whom his dedication was profound, complete, and reciprocal), Tony simply continued to stare up at her, uncertain, as she walked back toward Howard.

“You get that,” she said. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

He stared at Tony for a moment as she passed him, and swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Okay.”

Peggy kept up a running monologue to Tony all the way back to the mansion, in her customary way, which consisted primarily of speaking to him as though he were an adult. It was this, she suspected, that had won his devotion so totally: Erskine had told her once, many years ago, that all you had to do with children was speak to them as though they were grown-up, and they would love you; she had not necessarily expected this principle to extend to infancy, but she supposed Tony could sense it, somehow—or perhaps there was something particular about him that responded to this approach.

“Your father,” she said, “is not going to be pleased about that thing showing up on his property. He is going to take it apart seven ways from Sunday. I think that’s what you people say.”

Tony gurgled.

He was sticking her hair in his mouth by the time she stepped into the door of the house and closed it behind her, letting out a sigh. Even this back entrance to the house was preposterous—she thought the windows might actually have been authentic Tiffanys, and the staircase and banister were curving and ornate to match. The tiles were black and white checked. She tapped her shoes against them and turned to pull her hair out of Tony’s mouth. He made an annoyed sound.

“Sorry,” she said unapologetically. “That’s old hair, you know. That takes effort. Don’t you go messing it up.”

He reached for it again.

She should, she knew, call for Jarvis, to take him—Jarvis was really his parent, more than Howard certainly, and arguably more than Maria, who spent too many days in her dark room doing not much of anything, these days. But she did not want to let him out of her sight, not yet. She shifted her arm under him, and reached over to pinch his nose with her other hand. He let out an outraged shriek and then immediately started to cackle.

“That had an equal chance of making you scream, so thank you,” she said, and he laughed even more, despite the fact that she knew he had no idea what she had said.

Finally, Howard opened the door, and stuck his head in. “There you are,” he said, sounding relieved, and stepped in fully. “Jarvis!” he bellowed, and she heard footsteps begin pattering immediately upstairs. “It’s downstairs,” he said. “We can go down and look at it once we get read of the squirt.”

“All right,” she said. Tony had gone back to masticating her hair.

“Get off, Tony,” Howard said, reaching over to pull it out of his mouth. She pulled back a little, automatically. Tony started to wail, and Howard sighed. “Come on,” he said, looking at him sort of hopelessly. Peggy just rubbed his back while he fisted his little hand in her dress and started to wail in earnest. Howard rubbed a hand down his face and then reached out to touch Tony’s shoulder and the fine brown hair on the crown of his skull. He hardly seemed to notice, but Peggy did not think Howard was really expecting anything. That was not, she thought, the point.

“Yes, sir?” Jarvis said as he glided in, in the way that only very good butlers are capable of doing.

“Here you go, Jarvis,” Peggy said. She smiled a little, crookedly. “You know he’ll only have you in this state.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Jarvis demurred, and proceeded to take Tony out of her arms and calm him down in a matter of moments.

Howard sighed again, low and defeated, before turning to her. “Downstairs,” he said, which was, of course, where he always wanted to go.

He had cleared off a worktable and put the HYDRA rifle on it so that it was not touching anything and was pointed at a wall, but otherwise had not done anything to it. He crossed his arms and raised his thumb to his mouth in exactly the way he always had once they had gotten down to it, as though he were still twenty-one, twenty-two, and considering the problem of vita-rays.

“Do you think it works?” Peggy asked finally, once they had been standing there staring at it for what felt like an interminable period of time.

“To find that out I’d have to shoot it at something,” Howard said tersely. Peggy looked at him.

“Are you suggesting you _aren’t_ going to do that?” she said, and he glared.

“Not with you in the room,” he said.

“Chivalrous, all of the sudden,” she muttered.

“Don’t be stupid,” he snapped, and they lapsed into silence, still staring at it. It was an ugly thing: they knew it intimately. And as much as they, in their middle age, found themselves—in spite of themselves, in spite of logic, or reason—missing the war, they had never stopped being afraid of certain things. Peggy found this perversely encouraging. Howard did not share her point of view.

“A message, do you think?” he said finally.

“Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean.”

He let out a harsh laugh. “I’d say the answer’s pretty clear.”

She frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “It isn’t… I mean, I hate to say this, but if they wanted to kill you, here—if they got that far, they could have managed it.”

“Yes,” he said, “I know.” He paused. “You’re here, too, you know.”

She blinked, startled. “I—I suppose I am, yes.”

He sighed, and leaned back against another table, gripping the edge hard enough that his knuckles went white. “HYDRA is dead,” he said. “We eliminated it. We—we killed it. _Steve_ —”

“Steve ended HYDRA,” she said firmly, but that did not change the fact that they were looking at a HYDRA weapon, which had appeared in the middle of the Stark property in Westchester.

“What are you working on right now?” he asked.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Brezhnev, Vietnam—”

“I’m—consulting on a bunch of missiles they want to put in—I don’t even remember,” he said, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Fucking—Turkey? Christ. Nukes.”

She looked at him, and didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, I know,” he snapped. “We don’t do that. That’s what we always said, wasn’t it? We weren’t ever going to do that. What fucking idealistic kids.”

“We weren’t kids,” she said. “We had lived through the war.”

“Fuck, Peggy, they’ve got them all—pointed at us,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s not—it’s—”

But she was not, precisely, angry. It was true that they had once sworn that no matter what, they would never have anything to do with nuclear bombs: and it was true that they had been naïve. Anybody working in the government of the United States in those years had something to do with nuclear bombs, and they were not just working in the government: they were working in intelligence. But it remained the case that they had, until now, avoided direct engagement, direct endorsement: for Steve had gone into the ice with all of those bombs. And they had both wanted to create a world that was better than the one Steve had left, the sort of world Steve would have wanted to live in.

But that had been a long time ago.

“Somebody found out,” she said. “Or maybe it isn’t that. Maybe it’s nothing. Who knows.”

Howard pushed himself forward and walked forward, to the worktable, and leaned down over the gun. He looked much younger now than he had only ten or fifteen minutes before: this was what happened, Peggy knew, when he started to work. It was his curse. He reached out one careful hand and pulled the rifle toward him, and turned it over. He paused.

“Look,” he said. On the rifle’s underbelly, below the trigger—there was no magazine; it was not that kind of gun—somebody had scratched and shined in a red star.

“Oh,” she said, and they stood there and looked at it for some time.

“I’m moving to California,” he said suddenly, and she started, and turned to stare at him.

“I was going to anyway,” he said. “I was—thinking about it. But.” He licked his lips. His moustache, she found herself thinking, was very salt-and-peppery, now. “I’m going to sell the place and go.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You should do something more sensible, too,” he said grimly, and she just continued to look at him uncomprehendingly.

“Howard,” she said. “I realize this is—but—we get threats in the mail every day.”

He turned to look at her, and only the fact that they were standing very close to each other in his claustrophobic basement—claustrophobic because it was unbelievably full of _stuff_ , not because it was small—kept her from stepping back, because there was something raw and afraid in his eyes that she had not seen in a long time, if she ever had.

“I know they’ll be able to find me wherever I go,” he said. “I know that. I’m not an idiot, Peggy. I can’t exactly go off the grid. But—” He paused. “Can’t you feel it? Just the—knowing. That something is going to happen. Not now, maybe, not tomorrow, but—that it is coming.”

“I know,” she said. “I chose this line of work anyway.”

He let out a strange little laugh. “Peggy,” he said. “You are just as stupid as Steve was. I’m getting fucking—double vision.”

She smiled faintly. She was almost twice the age Steve had been, when he died. This was another thing she tried not to think about too much, no matter how often she thought of Steve.

“Maybe I’m just too old for it,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I’m never going to be too old for it,” she said. “Well—I do plan on retiring. But I think you know what I mean.”

He laughed sadly again. “Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately, I do.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m armed at all times. I may be old now but I’m still—what do you all say—a tough old broad.”

“I’d never call you an old broad,” he said, sounding faintly insulted. He looked at her again. “I am going to leave, though. Peggy.” And she could tell that he was being serious.

“Yes,” she said, and looked back down at the weapon, which seemed to have been taken directly out of her past, out of her mind, and put down on the table in front of them. “I know.”

“If the government wants to buy my guns they can,” he said, almost to himself. “But no more of this—shit. Maybe I’ll invent something useful for once.” But although Howard was perpetually inventing things that were not guns, or explosives—constantly, every week, a stream of strange new devices—she knew he would never do anything about any of them. Howard was made for guns, and bombs, and missiles.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe you’ll come out to visit, anyway.”

He turned to look at her. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.” But they both knew it would not be as often: for they were getting older. And California was farther away.

Before she left the next day to go back home, to her house and her husband and her job, back to the forbidding grey apparatus of the government and the country, which was and was not her own, she picked up Tony one more time, bounced him up and down and chatted at him and let him chew on her hair. She said goodbye to Maria, who was just a shadow in the hallway, and then put Tony down and pushed him away from her legs to toddle toward Jarvis. Howard walked her out toward the car, hands in his pockets.

“Not a very good visit,” he said.

“It could have been worse,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows, incredulous. He still, she thought, looked twenty-one.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“We could be trudging through the forest in Europe, covered in mud,” she said, and he smiled.

“Just like old times,” he said, and before she could get in the car that would take her to the train station, he leaned down to kiss her on the cheek.

When he pulled away she looked at him for a moment, and reached up to fix his rapidly greying hair. “Goodbye, and all that,” she said, and he smiled a little, small and private, as she got in the car and closed the door behind her.

Of course something would come for Howard, in spite of his best efforts, and for Peggy, too, although that would be of an entirely different kind—for nobody, even the very careful, can escape the enemy in the end. And neither of them would ever realize that it had been Zola who had engineered the delivery of the gun to the Stark property, Zola who had leaked the information—for even though Zola had once been HYDRA he had become such a nonentity to both of them that it simply did not occur to them that this could have been so. And so neither of them would ever be able to discover who it was who had left the rifle hanging on that tree branch—chosen for no reason than petty vindictiveness and irony—that is, until Howard was about to die, and saw the same red star cut into the uncanny arm of the man who going to kill him.

Peggy would never find out about either of those things. It was probably better this way.

But Howard did find out that the gun did not work. For the first thing he did, after Peggy left, was to return to his basement, and test it: and there was nothing left inside of it. It had been a long time, after all, and HYDRA’s cube ran on some kind of strange energy alone. The gun, it transpired, was just an empty vessel. And so, with an acute sense of vicious satisfaction, he junked it.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com).


End file.
